Apparently, Indian witch doctors are visiting New Zealand on “tourist or temporary work visas,” setting up shop, and conning locals out of a lot of money by pretending to have special powers. Even more, they’re offering 100% guarantees that their magic will protect people from things like money and marriage problems.

Pratima Nand, a resident who is rallying attention against these frauds, went undercover with a local news station to show how they work:

Domyo Burk is one of the bloggers on the Patheos Buddhist channel. She’s been doing a lot of research into spirituality and meditation for a new book, and along the way, she realized that she didn’t believe in God.

She never really believed in a personal God who answers your prayers and watches over you, but there were several years where she had “faith in Something Greater.” (That’s where the Zen stuff kicked in.)

But not anymore. She has a fascinating post about her journey away from God — which is nothing like the typical stories we hear — and I really appreciated this analogy:

Lori Arnold McFarlane used to be an evangelical Christian — and a very happy one at that. But a few years ago, after she openly mocked Harold Camping and his followers for warning people about the end of the world, she realized there really wasn’t much of a difference in their beliefs. The other side just attached a definitive date to an event she believed would happen in her lifetime. It wasn’t long before her faith in God disappeared completely.

She writes about that transition in a really beautiful memoir called The Last Petal Falling (CreateSpace, 2015):

Even though she had doubts of her own, McFarlane was intent on raising her three children to attend church and love Jesus. In the excerpt below, she writes about why she changed her mind about all that: